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I worry a lot about my kids. It’s the kind of worry — about their friends and peer pressure and just growing up — that wakes me at 3 am, and suddenly I’m Googling rare medical conditions that they don’t have (knock wood) and wearily checking the lock on my front door.

It shouldn’t be this way. My daughters are happy, healthy, smart, active girls. They have loving parents, extended family, close friends and a great school.

They even have new, comforting statistics on their side that should quell my anxiety. Studies show that today’s adolescents are more conservative and less likely to engage in risky behavior. Compared to our generation, they’re having less sex, smoking pot less often and consuming less alcohol and illegal drugs, Tara Parker-Pope reports in Sunday’s New York Times.

But another piece in the Sunday Times — an essay by Nancy Rommelman about growing up in Brooklyn in the 70s — illustrates why I continue to worry.

Nancy was a few years older than me and a little more wild (I was never “asked to leave” the progressive private school we both attended). But her accounts of nonchalant drug use, loitering on Montague St. and hanging out with “bad” boys from other neighborhoods ring all too familiar. Continue reading →

When her beloved 33-year-old daughter was dying of cancer in excruciating pain, Marilyn Howell did everything she could to help her. She nursed her; she explored every possible treatment option with her; and when all hope was gone, she crossed the line of legality and got her psychedelic drugs.

The drugs helped. As Marilyn describes in her new book, “Honor Thy Daughter,” her daughter Mara’s carefully supervised sessions with Ecstasy allowed her “one more experience without pain, one more chance to love life.” Psychedelic therapy — Ecstasy, LSD, mushrooms, added to marijuana — also seemed to help Mara reach acceptance of her own impending death.

But now she has retired, and is open about her identity in order to help spread her message. Listen here to her recent appearance on WBUR’s Radio Boston.

Author Marilyn Howell

“One of the things I want people to know is that you don’t have to choose between being in pain or being asleep” near death, she said. And, “I want them to know that research is starting up again and the most difficult challenge for researchers is getting subjects. The study I tried to sign my daughter up for five years ago closed up. There’s so much bias and prejudice among regular doctors — but it’s beginning to shift.”

Indeed, a trickle of research has gone on for years, including at Harvard’s McLean Hospital in Belmont, which has been running a small study on MDMA — Ecstasy — in end-stage cancer patients.

The splashiest recent finding came out last year, when a South Carolina psychiatrist reported in The Journal of Psychopharmacology that in a small but carefully run study of people with treatment-resistant Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, MDMA had brought dramatic improvement.

The research remains controversial. Federal drug-control authorities caution that findings of beneficial effects from drugs like Ecstasy — which is famous for its use during all-night raves and is known to be potentially addictive and bad for the brain — could encourage broader abuse.

And though psychedelic drugs have a long and fascinating history of experimental use by therapists, they also became somewhat tainted by association with the wild Timothy Leary “Tune in, turn on, drop out” gang of the 1960s.

These days, however, a new factor may help psychedelic research regain favor: In recent years, support for the medicinal use of marijuana has spread widely, to the point that it’s now legal in 16 states. The stories that tended to circulate a few years ago, of loving relatives who scored pot to bake magic brownies for their otherwise straight-as-an-arrow elders with cancer-related nausea, now seem almost quaint.

Is it such a leap to Ecstasy? When I spoke to Marilyn Howell, I complained to her that she had raised the bar for people who love dying patients. Continue reading →

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Massachusetts is the leading laboratory for health care reform in the nation, and a hub of medical innovation. From the lab to your doctor’s office, from the broad political stage to the numbers on your scale, we’d like CommonHealth to be your go-to source for news, conversation and smart analysis. Your hosts are Carey Goldberg, former Boston bureau chief of The New York Times, and Rachel Zimmerman, former health and medicine reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

If they’re so effective, why aren’t more women using IUDs and implants? A health clinic in Worcester is getting help to put better birth control front and center — particularly long-acting birth control, in hopes of cutting the high rate of unintended pregnancy.